Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now, while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. My name is Joshua. I am your host, and today on the show I want to talk with you about money mindset.

Or at least I want to begin talking with you about money mindset, or a different mindset about money. These words, mindset, money, money mindset, these words are words that I hear, not uncommonly, in financial circles, but they are some words that I didn't use to understand. They're words that didn't use to compute with me or mean anything to me.

I would hear people talk about having a certain money mindset, but I just didn't have a way to articulate it. I didn't deny the existence of some kind of way of thinking about money that makes a difference, but I didn't have a way to talk about it. However, over the last couple of years, I feel like I've personally gained a lot more clarity on this subject, to the point where I look at myself and I realize that I have a different mindset around money than I once had, and how I like my current mindset better than I like my old mindset.

I also recognize, as I talk to lots of people about money, I recognize how differently people think about money, and yet how these differences are not objectively true or objectively false. It's not like there's something that, "Oh, this is an ironclad law of the universe that things work this way." It's just that people have different mindsets with regard to money, different mindsets as to how they want to live their life.

And so I can't, in today's show, articulate everything that I now see. I want to begin the process of articulating some of the things that I do see, in hopes that this will be some ideas that will help you with your own mindset, to consider it, to think about it, to test it, see if you like it and you want to keep it, or see if you don't like it and you want to discard it.

And today we're going to begin with one simple saying that I made up. No one told it to me. It's original with me. But I like it so much that I want to share it with you, and I want you to feel free to take it and use it.

Feel free to steal it, because I think this is something really powerful about it. The statement is simply this. It's a statement of identity. Very very simple. Just a few words. Here's the statement. I make dreams come true. I make dreams come true. I make dreams come true. This is a statement that I thought of first some months ago, and as I was thinking about I realized, this is me.

This is what I do. And I applied it on a very personal level. We could add some pronouns, right? We could say, I make my dreams come true. I think that's appropriate. I want to talk about that. I make my dreams come true. But I have thought about it a lot in terms of the people in my life, right?

I make my wife's dreams come true. I make my children's dreams come true. I make my siblings' dreams come true. I make my parents' dreams come true. I make dreams come true. And then I expanded out to that. I make my neighbors' dreams come true. I make my clients' dreams come true.

I make my listeners' dreams come true. And for me, this has become an extremely powerful form of my identity. And it's given me a different mindset about money than I once had. If I were to articulate in just a few words some of the things that I once thought about money, I would say that—well, I hate to actually use these words because they're quite trite and overused—I would say that in the past, I operated from a scarcity mentality, from the perspective that there's only so much money around, right?

There's only so many—there's only a certain amount, and you've got to make sure you're careful with it. And I don't discard that entirely, right? I believe in being careful with money. There's a different mindset if you think of money as being a scarce resource that has to be held onto and guarded versus money being a tool that is available to you in abundance.

And what has helped me to identify how I want to use money is that, for me, I want money to be used to make dreams come true. As I record this podcast episode, I am sitting in my family's hotel room in the beautiful country of Mexico. We've just begun a fairly—I don't know exactly how long this trip is going to go.

Let's call it a short to medium to long-term trip. And I don't know how far this trip is going to take us, but I've loaded up, you know, my wife, we have our four children, and we've gotten on airplanes, we've discarded all of our stuff, gotten down to suitcases again, and we're hitting the road.

And we're planning to travel for some time. The exact details are still a little bit fuzzy because of the challenges of traveling during a global pandemic and all of the border closings and all of the administrative challenges due to that. But right now we're hitting the road. And part of that comes directly out of this concept of identity.

Am I the kind of person who sits back and who waits and who hopes that someday I might be able to make a dream come true? Or am I the kind of person who makes dreams come true? The reality is I make dreams come true. I make dreams come true.

And this is becoming more and more a core component of my personal identity. And it gives me something that I find very useful as a metric to which I can hold something up. Right? Is there somebody that I can help make a dream come true? Here's somebody in need.

Can I make their dream come true? Can I help friends and family members who have unfulfilled dreams? Is there anything I can do to make dreams come true for them? Because I make dreams come true. Now I'll share more in future episodes about our travels. I'll share a lot as we go actually.

When we traveled before I didn't share a lot publicly. But I'll share about the hard times and the good times. Because one of the things that I like to do is I like to test things. I like to test things for myself. And it's part of – but I also like to test them for you and learn along the way.

Because I've done so much financial coaching over the years that I've learned that we really have just as human beings we really more or less share probably about 80% of our dreams commonly. Meaning that you'll have your own 20% that are unique to you. I don't have any interest in painting world class portraits.

But somebody does. I don't have any interest in racing motorcycles. But somebody does. But more or less many of our dreams they're similar to each other in about 80% of them. And so I want to be one who makes dreams come true for you. I want to be one who shows you the way to do things.

I want to be one who tests things and says, "Here's how you can do it. Here's how you can do this quickly. Here's how you can achieve this rapidly." Because I've learned so much that if you identify yourself as a person who takes action, as a person who doesn't just sit around and wait for your dreams, you can achieve dreams much faster than many people think possible.

This has actually become more and more part of my own personal identity. I've realized I make dreams come true. Which means that I can have a client who can come to me and say, "Joshua, here's my dream." And I can work out very quickly ways for that dream to come true quickly.

And so you don't need to wait 30 years. You can do it now. You can do it in two years. You can do it in five years, 10 years. I make dreams come true. And so I want to walk you through that statement with a little bit of change of emphasis so that you can understand how that simple statement can give you a track to run on if you like it.

Because when you adjust your emphasis, you often get different aspects of truth. Let's begin at the beginning. I make dreams come true. I make dreams come true. I am that man who makes dreams come true. That's me. The one who makes dreams come true? Yep, that's me. I do it.

I do it. And I think a lot of times this really is the beginning of personal growth. If you read a dozen or so self-development, personal development books, at least half of them will talk about how the starting point of personal success is personal responsibility, where you take responsibility for your life and you stop expecting anything from anyone else.

You stand up and say, "I am in charge of me." And the day that you take personal responsibility for your life, complete and total 100% responsibility for your life and for everything in it can be a day in which everything changes. And for me, I make dreams come true puts the pressure in the right place.

I'm the one who makes dreams come true. Because if I'm the one who makes dreams come true, then I'm the one who can start to think about the process of how I might go about it. I think any one of us who is perhaps older than 15 years old would recognize that there are always things that will happen outside of our control.

There are things and situations that the world throws at us that we did not choose. But even though we are not ultimately in control, we can still take responsibility for what we can control. And I can be the man who makes dreams come true. One of the trends in our day and age that really concerns me very deeply is the trend of disempowerment and victimization.

For some reason, it has become hip and cool to be a victim. It's become a better way to be. If you can be somebody who is victimized, if you can be somebody who is oppressed, it gains you social credit. And with your social credit now, you can enhance your circumstances.

The challenge is, when you start seeing yourself as an oppressed victim, it's really hard to change that perspective of yourself. It's really hard to look at yourself as an oppressed victim and simultaneously see yourself as a powerful victor. Those two things don't really go very well together. And so pretty much in life, I'm convinced at this point that you kind of have to choose.

You have to choose the life that you're going to live. Are you going to choose to be the person who is oppressed by your circumstances? Are you going to choose to be the person who is being victimized by those around you? Are you going to be the person who is a victim of the world at large?

Or are you going to be the person who steps up and says, "I am responsible and I'm going to overcome this." Here's what I've observed about this particular line of thinking. It doesn't actually matter whether it's true or whether it's not. Meaning you could have a person who is genuinely a victim, who is an oppressed victim, and yet that person can study the mindset of victims and recognize, "That really doesn't serve me.

It doesn't help me." And they can acknowledge freely, "I'm oppressed. I'm a victim. I'm persecuted." They can acknowledge that as absolutely true. But if they will discard that and choose a different way of thinking, there's no guarantee that it'll help them to no longer be an oppressed victim, but there's a far higher likelihood that they'll be able to escape their oppression than if they didn't believe it.

And so when you think about your personal identity and how you see yourself, regardless of what the actual circumstances are, regardless of the actual truth, the actual veracity of whether you are powerful and in control or not, recognize that the mindset of somebody who chooses to take responsibility is going to have a higher probability of success than the mindset of somebody who doesn't, somebody who just sits back and waits for things to happen.

So in that tiny little word "I," there's actually a huge, huge amount of personal impact waiting to happen. When you step up and you say, "I make dreams come true," and I encourage you even to start with simply this, "I make my dreams come true. I make my dreams come true." You step up and you say, "I make my dreams come true." It starts to fill you with a sense of clarity, a sense of purpose, and a sense of direction.

All right, well, if I'm the guy who's going to make my dreams come true, I got to actually step up and say, "It's time to make progress. What do I do?" And I got to pull the problem apart, study it, start working on it, because I make my dreams come true.

It's all on me. If it's to be, it's up to me. If it's to be, it's up to me. I hope you find that useful. I do. I wholeheartedly concede that the world around gives me a set of circumstances that I can't control. If it's to be, is it truly, ultimately, completely up to me?

The answer is an obvious no. No, it's not. But the, "If it's to be, it's up to me," mindset, that puts me in a place where I can take responsibility for how I respond to the circumstances that are outside of my control, and it puts me in a place of growth.

I make dreams come true. I make my dreams come true. Next, I make dreams come true. I make dreams come true. I make dreams come true. Make is an action verb. It's a doing. There's work involved. There's effort. If I make dreams come true, then the obvious question comes, "How?

How? What? How? How?" Right? "I make," as a standalone sentence, doesn't make any sense. It only makes sense to use the word "make" if there is an object. I make what? I make where? I make how? There has to be some modification of that word "make." But the word "make" is a really good action verb.

And by focusing on action verbs, I'm teaching my brain to look for the things that can be done. Again, back to this victimization mindset. A victim looks at the world and says, "I'm a victim. I'm oppressed. I'm pushed down. These circumstances that I'm in are just too difficult for me." And what happens is the brain accepts that as true.

The brain sits back and says, "You know what? It's true. You're right. You're right." And all you start to see constantly is reasons why that's true. I used to believe that people believe what they see. I no longer do. I now believe that we see what we believe. I know this is sounding super frou-frou and fluffy.

I get it. I get it. I'm convinced it's true. That's why I'm saying it. I hate sounding like a motivational speaker because I kind of feel there's so many motivational speakers that their words often are hollow. But I'm convinced it's true, which is why I'm talking about it. So forgive how it sounds.

I'm convinced it's true. You'd weigh it and test it for yourself. In life, we don't believe what we see. We simply see what we believe. We live our lives looking to see the movie that's in our head expressed in reality around us. And the vast majority of the time, the reality that's expressed around us is exactly the movie that we saw in our head.

It's crazy. It's crazy. I think you could see this most obviously in politics. As a longtime observer of politics, I've taken a great deal of interest in reading over the years people's political opinions. Because people are so obvious and clear with their political opinions, you can see what they think.

And you'll see an event happen. And if you keep lists of political people who disagree with each other, who see the world differently, you'll see the exact same event, the exact same facts, the exact same video, the exact same thing. And two people will walk away with it with polarized opposite perspectives.

It's crazy. It's absolutely crazy. And you sit and you read them and you say, "Are they talking about the same event?" They're talking about the same event, the same video clip, the same speech, the same policy. And yet they walk away with two exactly opposite perspectives on it. Because they see what they believe.

They see what they believe. So if that's true, then we need to be very careful about what we believe. And if you believe that I make dreams come true, then what you constantly see is opportunities to make that truth. If you believe I'm waiting for my dreams to come true, then what you constantly see is opportunities for you to sit and wait.

Now there's a fineness, a finesse, a texture to this. All of my dreams have not yet come true. I am waiting on many parts of my dreams to come true. And I'm sure you are too. Because dreams don't come true just because you wish them to be true. But if you see yourself as the person who makes dreams come true, then you see opportunities to be making your dreams come true.

Whereas if you see yourself as the person who waits for your dreams to come true, then you see opportunities for you to be the kind of person who waits for your dreams to come true. And I think that sucks myself. I don't want to live that way. So I choose to believe I make dreams come true.

Now you'll notice that I'm using either four or five words in this little statement. I'm including a pronoun or sometimes I'm excluding the pronoun. I make my dreams come true. I make my wife's dreams come true. I make my children's dreams come true. I like to simply say to myself, I make dreams come true.

I'm the kind of person who makes dreams come true. And the reason I do this is I believe that it opens my brain up. It opens my mind up to see opportunities to make dreams come true for anybody that comes across my path. And what I'm convinced, I'm still convinced 20 years later, ever since I first heard Zig Ziglar say it 20 years ago, that you can have everything in life that you want if you just help enough other people get what they want.

Or as I like to think about it, if you can love enough neighbors, you'll have plenty of love from your neighbors. If you can help enough people, you'll have plenty of help from other people. And so I love the way to think about this word, this amply. I make dreams come true because by not restricting it to one particular pronoun, I make my dreams come true.

I can look at the world and say, are there any opportunities for me to make a dream come true today? And I'm convinced that practically on a daily basis, the answer is yes. Yes. I heard a story years ago. I think it was about John Maxwell, but I'm not sure.

I think it was a friend of John Maxwell's was telling me they were doing some trip with him. He did like some trip to Israel and they were on this trip with him and he had inserted something like a special thing. I don't remember, like a special dinner, special event on that trip.

And it just blew them away about how thoughtful he was. He had thought ahead and he had arranged this certain event. And I thought to myself, I want to be that kind of guy. I want to be the guy who we're all on a trip or we're going somewhere and here's the spontaneous surprise.

Here's the event, the special meal, the special touch, the special singer or piece of music. It's just a special thing. I want to be the kind of guy who brings that kind of joy to the party. And a lot of my life I've not been that kind of guy, but I want to be that kind of guy.

And I want to be the kind of guy who thinks about opportunities to make dreams come true. Because a lot of times it's within my capacity to make a dream come true for someone if I'll simply pay attention. Same for you. All right, let me give an example. I am sure that you personally engage in various kinds of charity.

Most people do, where they give money away to others expecting nothing in return. A lot of times though, I think that we give money away in contexts where we don't get to experience the power of the gift. An emergency happens across the world and we call up and make a donation to the Red Cross and they take your $300 and they put it in with the rest of the thousands and hundreds of thousands of dollars into their general fund and they do their job.

But it doesn't change somebody's life. But take that same $300 and if you can give it a disaster, sure, I'm not saying don't do it, but think about how you could take that $300 and how you could make a dream come true for someone. What if you gave that $300 donation to one person?

Maybe there's a guy sleeping on the street in your neighborhood and you just went to him and you gave him $300 or $300 worth of help of some kind if you could find some way to help him. What if you went to a struggling single mom that's in your church and instead of giving $300 to the Red Cross, you paid her rent this month or you sent her and her family on a vacation or something like that?

The point is that life is full of opportunities and if we look through the lens of I make dreams come true, then it puts us in a place of looking around and saying, "What dream could I make come true for someone else?" And even at the small level, even at let's say the $300 level, are you going to change somebody's life with $300?

Probably not. You're not going to solve the homeless guy living in your neighborhood. You're not going to solve his problems with $300. You're not going to solve the problem for a single mom with $300 if she doesn't have any money. But what you can often do is you can make a dream come true.

You can take somebody on a helicopter ride. You can take somebody to an event that they just would never spend the money on. Take them to a concert. Take them to, I don't know, Disney World or something that makes sense to you. I've always been fairly practical. I used to look at people and I used to think, "Why would they spend the money on that?" Especially poor people.

I used to judge poor people a lot and say, "Why would so-and-so spend money on that? That's dumb. If they just saved their money, they could not be poor anymore." But along the way, I started to observe that when people spend money frivolously, it brings little sparks of joy into their life.

It brings little bits of light into their life. And while I personally, I don't think that if I were in financial difficulty, I would choose to be frivolous with money, I would still want joy in my life. And maybe there are times that I would. To this day, I guess this is confessions of Joshua, I have never in my life bought a firework.

I've never spent a dollar on a firework. I've always thought, "Why would I burn money up? It doesn't make sense to me. I'll go to a firework presentation that someone else has done and sure, is there some of my tax dollar supporting it?" Maybe sometimes. But I've never personally gone to a firework stand and purchased fireworks.

But I can't deny the joy that you can bring to your children's heart with some fireworks. I think that in the coming years, I'll probably for the first time buy some fireworks or some version of those kinds of events. I thought about that right now while I'm on this trip.

Why am I on this trip? Well, part of it is I make dreams come true. I make dreams come true. I'm the person who looks and says, "What dreams are out there?" And that means I'm going to pay attention to my dreams, my wife's dreams, my children's dreams and I'm going to look for opportunities to make them come true.

And I'm going to do this on a daily basis. I'm going to say, "What would be something cool? What would be something special? How could I bring some joy to life? How can I bring some life to this party that's around me?" I don't much see what the point is of getting rich if you don't enjoy it.

Again, change of mindset, didn't used to see that. But at this point in time, I honestly genuinely don't see what the point of getting rich is if you don't bring some joy to life. I have a very hard time these days reading a lot of frugal blogs, reading people's stories and whatnot because a lot of what they say just doesn't resonate with me because it's not wrapped in the wrapper of a joyful life.

Now I respect people's ability to make their own decisions. I respect each person's ability to choose what to do. But I don't get it. I don't see what the point of it is. I'll give you just an example from a friend of mine. I have a friend of mine who lives near Orlando.

And each year, this particular friend, a couple of friends, they enjoy going sometimes, they have enjoyed going to the Gaylord Palms in Orlando to see the Christmas celebrations. If you've never been to Gaylord Palms Resort, they're pretty spectacular. They're pretty amazing. I still remember the first time I went to Gaylord Palms in Orlando and just it's pretty jaw-dropping to see.

Beautiful. Then inside the Gaylord Palms, I think there's one in Washington, I think, one in Tennessee, one in Orlando and there may be one more. But inside the Gaylord Palms, they have different scenes that are set up. And they have this giant atrium with a glass roof and they have all the different animals and flora.

And it's really incredible to see. And then they decorate beautifully for Christmas. And so my friends who went, they have a lot of money. They're financially independent. They have a lot of money. Now, they got there by being very careful with their expenses. They're very frugal and they got there by being frugal with their expenses.

But they planned and they drove to Orlando to go and have lunch at the Gaylord Palms. And they got to the parking lot and to park, I think it's $14 to park your car at the Gaylord Palms, regardless of how much time it is. And they were so annoyed by the $14 fee that instead of going in and having lunch, they turned around and they left.

And when I heard the story, I just thought, "What is the point of being rich if you don't go to the Gaylord Palms for lunch to enjoy the Christmas decorations? And why would $14 be the point that turns you away?" Now, in defense, if I actually asked my friends directly, they would say, "Listen, Joshua, we like saving money and we're happier to save money than we are to squander it on $14 of a parking fee.

And it's their money. They're responsible. They don't answer to me or to anybody and I respect them and their decisions. But it doesn't make sense to me, me personally." Now, share it with you because perhaps you've done things like that, that you could have the nice thing, but you don't.

Why not? Why not? If you're financially independent, you're not going to all of a sudden go broke because you bought the $14 parking fee to go and enjoy the experience. It's kind of similar in like the way I scratch my head sometimes with people who go to run-of-the-mill ordinary restaurants all the time.

And I think, "Why do you go to Chili's?" I actually like Chili's. I'm a weirdo. I don't go to Chili's or Friday's or these restaurants chains in the United States. I enjoy Olive Garden breadsticks. But there are a lot of people who go to those things constantly and I think, "Why not switch it up?" Right?

Go this week, but the next week take a bottle of wine and a nice baguette to the park so that the following week you can go to the really great steakhouse. Why not have the variety, the zest of life? We're not all the same. People are different. But look for the opportunities to make dreams come true.

Look for the opportunities to do things that are genuinely special. Because if you don't do that, if you don't make dreams come true, then life just has a certain sameness to it. It's kind of the same old, same old, same old. And this is easy, right? I have four young children.

It's challenging for me to say, to keep my life full of the kinds of experiences that I want to keep it full of. It's challenging. It's really tough. I enjoy a Netflix and chill night just like anybody else does. In fact, I probably enjoy it more than going to a theater.

But if life is not made up of moments with some spice, some moments that make you go, "This is nice," then there's this just boring sameness to it all, this humdrum existence. And I don't think that's necessary. You can do better and I think you should. Make dreams come true.

I stole my thunder on the next one. I make dreams come true. Now a dream doesn't have to be a big thing. I just started listening on this trip. We've been driving with the children and I'm always looking for... I find it really hard to find good Spanish audio books for them.

And so I just started them off on Anne of Green Gables in Spanish, "Anna de las Tejas Verdes." I've read Anne of Green Gables when I was a kid and I enjoyed it. But so I've been listening to it yesterday in the car while driving across Mexico with my family.

And I was listening to it and I was just thinking about, I love that protagonist's view of life. She's just got this zest for living, this desire to take full advantage of everything. And the things that she is dreaming of are profoundly simple. And yet in the story, they're meaningful to her.

And I think a lot of times we're scared to talk about dreams. We're scared to talk about dreams because somehow we unconsciously assign multimillion dollar price tags to dreams. And yet you don't have to do that. I make dreams come true. The first step of making a dream come true is to identify what the dream is.

And a lot of times these are very simple. I'll share one of mine. It's no secret. I spent a lot of my life living a very structured existence, getting up, very, very busy, packed schedule, et cetera. A number of years ago, I just realized one of my dreams... Why did I want to be financially independent?

Why do I want to be financially independent? Because I don't want to have an alarm clock. Realized one of my dreams is to live a life where I don't have to have an alarm clock. Now you can take that in two ways. You can say, "Well, I got to have $10 million in the bank so I don't have to get up in the morning." Or you can just adjust your life in some way that you don't need an alarm clock.

And I personally find living more or less without an alarm clock... Of course, I have a phone like everyone else that I have to catch a flight. I set an alarm clock. But I enjoy very much the existence of living without answering to an alarm clock. I've made my dream come true.

And when you sit back and you start thinking about dreams, you have to begin with a list. If you say, "I make dreams come true," in addition to whose dreams, which we just talked about, what are those dreams? What are they? And you start to pay attention. Now it would be nice if we could all have a list of all the dreams and write them down, but the reality is none of us are that structured in life.

But by actually paying attention and realizing, "You know what? This is a dream of mine," then you can identify something that you want and you can pay attention to it. And so much of the time, we don't pay attention to the things that we want and thus we have no clarity on where we want to go, no clear idea of what we want to do or why.

And with that lack of clarity, we move through life without any sense of direction, without any sense of certainty. We live out the dreams that other people have handed to us. The society has said that this is what you should do, and we don't go with it. Give you an example, okay?

Very simple example. I may at some point in the future own a house again. I'm not opposed to owning a house. But my dream is not to own a house. That's not me. I don't want to just have a big, beautiful house and be there all the time and whatnot.

I have people that I love very much. That is their dream. And so by just simply recognizing that's not my dream, you can give yourself permission to imagine a whole different lifestyle and recognize that we don't all have to live the same lifestyle. Maybe this is. I don't know maybe about it.

This is a very millennial type of thing. But I remember the day when I ticked the last box on life's list. I ticked that last box, right? I graduated from high school. I went to college. I graduated from college. I got a job. I got married. I got a dog.

And the last box, I bought a house. And the last box that I ticked was have a baby. I remember when I bought my wife and I had our first child and I just thought, "I'm done. I've done it. I'm done." I never worried about, "Oh, you're going to have a college fund." I'm done.

I ticked all the boxes. Now I've experienced what this is like and I can consciously choose to enjoy these things or I can consciously choose to make different decisions in life. Got rid of my job. Got rid of my house. Not going to get rid of my dogs, my kids, or my wife, but I'm willing to think about a different lifestyles than most people do.

And I love it. It's exciting. Why? Because I've become more attuned to what my personal dreams are. Now I'm trying to pay a lot of attention also to what are the dreams of those around me. I've become a much better listener over the last years. What are my wife's dreams?

What are my children's dreams? What are my parents' dreams? Because if I make dreams come true, I'm the kind of person who has to listen for what those are and look for opportunities to bring some spice to life. Not always been very good at it, but I want to be good at it.

I want to get better because I want to be the kind of person who makes dreams come true. I make dreams come true. In order to make a dream come true, you have to follow through. You have to actually do it. I make dreams come true. Not just in my head, not just imagining them.

I actually make them come true. We come back again to that point of action, that point of commitment, that point of actually doing something. I'll give you an example from my own set of dreams. Later this year, I personally hope to, that's the idea again, administrative challenges, but later this summer and this fall, I hope to be in Israel.

The reason that I hope to be there is because a number of years ago I went to Egypt. When I was in Egypt, my entire perspective of the history of the human race completely changed. To put it in just a few words, growing up in the West, you basically have this idea, this archetype that's instilled upon you, it's imprinted on your brain, that things throughout the world have come from a place of crude beast, let me be careful with that word, crude beastliness, a place of crude, rough beginnings, no culture, no anything, to our current age where we are the most advanced creatures who've ever walked the planet.

This is certainly common in the evolutionary paradigm in which so much of our world swims. The idea that there was a point in time where there was chaos and disorder, and yet through the power of a biological evolutionary process, things are just getting better and better and better all the time, more and more sophisticated and better and better.

But yet it goes deeper than that. It's not just a biological argument that people make. It's just more of the societal argument. You see this happen right now in our society where people say, "Well, we're more enlightened. We understand more about life. We understand the world. We're enlightened, much more enlightened than our forebears.

How could so-and-so have believed these beastly concepts, these crude and rough concepts? Today we know what the verdict of history is going to be, and so we're going to be on the right side of history going forward." That's the basic, I would say, mindset that infuses our culture. This is especially powerful in the United States of America because US Americans generally see themselves as superior to virtually every country in the world on virtually every metric, and it's just accepted as a matter of faith.

That's the way it is. Of course it's the way it is. After all, this is the United States of America. I remember the first time I went to ... I've only been to Egypt one time so far. I went to Egypt, and I started walking through ... The pyramids were ...

I don't know. It was neat to see them, but they didn't impress me all that much. What impressed me was the temples. Egypt is so full of these temples, and you walk through some of these ... I think it's Luxor and Aswan, and you look at these temples and you think, "This is amazing." I read my Bible a lot over the years, but I was reading when I was there in Egypt through Genesis and all of a sudden the world looked totally different, and I realized I could never go back.

If you read the Bible and it talks about Joseph being put a second in command under the pharaoh, you think, "Oh, Joseph was this little guy out here. He had ... It says he had granaries full of grain to save the children of Israel from the famine. Maybe he had a barn or two." No.

This was a stunning culture. The sophistication, the cultural sophistication of the Egyptian people of that day was absolutely breathtaking. I realized I'd like to see this better. I want to go to Petra. I want to go to Jordan. I want to go to Israel. I want to understand these ancient cultures, because this concept that somehow was imprinted upon me was completely wrong.

The problem is that although I said it, I spent several years just sitting there. It's like, "Okay, I'd like to do it someday. I'd like to do it someday, but that's not a good time. We're having a baby. It's expensive to go to Israel, et cetera." I'm like, "No, I really want to do it.

I want to go to Israel. I want to go to Jordan. I want to go back to Egypt. I want to see it for myself." Finally, at some point in time, I realized, "Listen, Joshua, if you're the kind of guy who makes dreams come true, you got to actually make them come true, which means you make the decision.

You pull out the credit card and you put the numbers in and you buy a plane ticket. You make a hotel reservation. You sign on the dotted line. You pull the trigger. You insert your favorite metaphor, but action is necessary to make dreams come true. But action only proceeds from a clearer vision of who you are.

It only proceeds from your mindset. If I'm the kind of person who has dreams, then I'm the kind of person who can look at life and say, "I've got dreams. I've got goals. I've got plans. I've got things I'd like to do. I've got dreams. Who doesn't?" But if I'm the kind of person who makes dreams come true, it changes the world and it makes you realize that, "All right, Joshua, you want to go to Israel.

You've said for three years you want to go to Israel. You've written it down. I'd like to go to Israel, but it's just never been convenient." Are you the kind of person who makes dreams come true or are you the kind of person who just, "Maybe I didn't actually want to go to Israel." It's actually not that hard to go to Israel.

It's hard in a pandemic, of course, with closed borders, but it shouldn't be very hard pretty soon. You buy a plane ticket. You go. Hire a tour guide, tour around, and you go and do it. And almost any dream is actually about that simple. Notice I said simple, not easy.

Almost any dream is about that simple. Many times we have dreams that are hard. Hard is okay. I like Cliff Gravenscraft's thing, "I don't need easy. I just need worth it." It's his favorite saying. I love that saying. It's great. "I don't need easy. I just need worth it." It's hard to do easy.

I don't mind hard things. Doing hard things is fun. As human beings, we're wired to do hard things. Why do people go out and run marathons? There's no reason for them to go run a marathon. The car works a lot better. The car gets them from point A to point B.

A marathon is terrible for you. Running marathons is awful for you, but it's hard, and so psychologically it's good for you, because it's something hard. We like doing hard things. Why do we want to save a million dollars or earn $100,000 or get a college degree? We're not scared of these hard things.

Hard things make us feel alive. They make us feel excited, enthusiastic about life. Doing hard things is actually quite fun. Just think about this. Think about your friends. Here's my tough mudder pictures. Why are you in the freezing rain crawling under barbed wire through the mud? Because it was fun.

Why was it fun? It was hard. I didn't like it, and I wanted to do it. The examples are endless. People do hard things because they're fun. It feels good to do something difficult. It feels good to have a sense of accomplishment. Yeah, I did that thing. I hiked to the bottom of the Grand Canyon and back out.

I drove my motorcycle across the United States. We hiked to the tip of Ushuaia. Whatever it is, we did it. It's fun to do hard things. We don't need easy. We just need worth it. I'm not scared by a hard dream. Hard dream is probably simple. Take almost any hard thing that you have in life.

I want to become a millionaire. It's not that hard to become a millionaire. It's a fairly simple process. How much money do you earn? How much money do you spend? How much money do you invest, and at what rate of return? Do the math. We'll tell you when to become a millionaire.

It's very simple. It's not easy, but it's simple. If your dream is to become a millionaire, there you go. You can do it. But once you count the cost, you actually have to sit down and say, "Okay, I'm making this much. I probably need to make more. I'm spending this much.

I probably need to spend less, and I'm investing at this amount. I probably need to make a little more money on my investments." These things are simple, but they're doable, and you can achieve the dream. But you have to see yourself as the kind of person who can do it and actually start doing it to make it come true.

If your dream is to go to Israel, you got to make it come true. If your dream is to run a marathon, you got to make it come true. If your dream is to get married, make it come true. Whatever. You got to make it come true. If you have the right mindset, and by right, I mean a mindset that is useful to you, a mindset that serves you.

I'm not arguing here that there's a mindset that's objectively true and objectively wrong. True and false, right and wrong. By right, I mean you have a mindset that serves you as a person that helps you. If you have the right mindset, all of a sudden, life becomes a lot simpler, a lot clearer.

I wish I could have understood that 15 years ago. I didn't. But I feel like today I do. And one component of that is this very simple statement. I make dreams come true. If you like my statement, I encourage you to say it to yourself, and really think about it.

I make dreams come true. I make dreams come true. I make dreams come true. I make dreams come true. I make dreams come true. I make dreams come true. I make dreams come true. I make dreams come true. I make my dreams come true. I make my wife's dreams come true.

I make my children's dreams come true. I make dreams come true. I make dreams come true. Not to-do lists. I make dreams come true. I make dreams come true. I make dreams come true. I make dreams come true. I make dreams come true. Are you ready to make your next pro basketball, football, hockey, concert, or live event unforgettable?

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